The Pancha Bhuta Sthalam: Five Element Temples

Every day, in a temple in the small town of Chidambaram, a priest draws aside a curtain to reveal the deity, and behind the curtain there is nothing at all.

No image. No lingam. No carved face in the lamplight. Only empty space, hung about with garlands of golden leaves. The worshippers bow to the emptiness, because the emptiness is the point. This is the Chidambara Rahasyam, the secret of Chidambaram, and the god it reveals is space itself.

Chidambaram is one of five temples scattered across the Tamil country and into Andhra. Each one enshrines Shiva as one of the five elements that the tradition holds the whole material world is made from: earth, water, fire, air, and the space that holds them. Apart, they are five old shrines with five strange features. Together, they make one of the boldest claims in all of Hindu thought.

The claim is this. God is not somewhere inside the universe. God is the universe.

The five elements

The framework comes from the oldest layer of Indian cosmology. In the analysis the Samkhya system gives, the manifest world unfolds into ever grosser forms, and the last and most concrete of them are the five great elements, the pancha bhuta: prithvi (earth), ap (water), agni (fire), vayu (air), and akasha (ether, or space). They are ranked by subtlety. Earth, the densest, can be smelt, tasted, seen, touched, and heard. Space, the subtlest, carries only sound. The order from earth up to space is an order of refinement, a ladder from the most solid thing to the most nearly nothing.

To map a single God onto all five of these is to say something precise and enormous. It is to say that Shiva is the substance of the world, top to bottom, the solid ground and the running water and the burning fire and the moving air and the empty space they all happen in. The Tamil saint Appar sang it directly, in the public-domain rendering of Kingsbury and Phillips from 1921: Shiva is “immanent in Vishnu, in Brahma, in flame and in wind, yea in the mighty sounding sea and in the mountains.”

The five temples take that abstract idea and nail it to five places on the map, so that a pilgrim can walk to it, touch it, and circle it. They climb the ladder of the elements, from the earth you stand on to the space you cannot hold. Here they are, in that order.

Earth, at Kanchipuram

In the temple city of Kanchipuram stands Ekambareswarar, the temple of the earth element, where Shiva is the Lord of the Mango Tree.

Its proof of earth is the lingam itself. The image here is a prithvi lingam, held to be self-manifest and made of earth, of sand, and because it is sand it is never bathed in water in the ordinary way, lest it dissolve. It is anointed instead with oils and pastes. The legend of the temple turns on exactly this fragility. The tradition tells that Parvati, doing penance under the ancient mango tree by the river, moulded a lingam out of sand to worship, and when Shiva sent a flood to test her, she wrapped her own body around the sand-lingam to shield it from the water until the danger passed. Shiva, moved, appeared to her here. Earth, protected from water by love.

The temple is among the largest in Tamil Nadu, raised over centuries by the Pallavas, the Cholas, and above all the kings of Vijayanagara, whose towering southern gateway is one of the tallest in India. The saint Sambandar sang of it as “Kachchi Ekambam’s fair town”, Kachchi being the old name of Kanchipuram, and ended the verse, “my mind can think of naught beside, naught beside Him, and Him alone.”

Water, at Thiruvanaikaval

Near Tiruchirapalli, on the river island of Srirangam, stands Jambukeswarar at Thiruvanaikaval, the temple of water.

Its proof of water is permanent and physical. The appu lingam, the water-lingam, sits in a sanctum fed by an underground spring that keeps it perpetually wet; the water seeps back even when it is bailed away. The temple’s name comes from its legend. The tradition tells of two of Shiva’s attendants born on earth as an elephant and a spider, each worshipping the lingam in its own way, the elephant bathing it daily with river water carried in its trunk, the spider spinning a canopy of web above it for shade. Because an elephant, anai in Tamil, worshipped here, the place became Thiru-anai-kaval, the sacred elephant grove, and Shiva took the name Jambukeswara from the jambu, the rose-apple tree, that grows over the shrine.

The goddess here, Akhilandeshwari, the mistress of the whole universe, is so powerful in her own right that the temple is as much hers as Shiva’s. Around the sanctum run five great concentric walls, so that the pilgrim to the water-god, like the pilgrim everywhere in the south, walks inward through ring after ring.

Fire, at Tiruvannamalai

At Tiruvannamalai rises Arunachaleswarar, the temple of fire, and here the element is not in the sanctum alone. The whole hill is the god.

The mountain Arunachala is held to be Shiva himself, the cooled and visible form of an infinite column of fire. This is the great myth of the lingodbhava, the arising of the linga, the same story that underlies the twelve Jyotirlingas. To settle a quarrel between Brahma and Vishnu over which of them was supreme, Shiva appeared as a pillar of fire with no top and no bottom. Vishnu took the form of a boar and dug downward to find its base; Brahma took the form of a swan and flew up to find its crown. Neither reached an end. The absolute cannot be measured or climbed to or dug down to. Appar sang it: “Vishnu, spouse of Lakshmi, and four-ways-facing Brahm, searched the heights and depths, but Thy feet could never see.”

Once a year, on the Karthigai full moon, a great fire-beacon, the Maha Deepam, is lit in an enormous cauldron of ghee on the summit, blazing into the night for miles, re-enacting the pillar of fire. Around the base, pilgrims walk the fourteen kilometres of the hill barefoot, a circuit called Girivalam, especially on full-moon nights. And in the twentieth century the hill drew the sage Ramana Maharshi, who settled at its foot, taught the question “Who am I?” for decades, and regarded Arunachala as Shiva himself made stone, never a mere symbol of him.

Air, at Srikalahasti

Across the border into Andhra Pradesh, near Tirupati, stands Srikalahasti, the temple of air, the one of the five that lies outside the Tamil country.

Air cannot be carved, so the temple shows it by its effect. In the inner sanctum, sealed and windless, a lamp flame flickers and bends continually, as if stirred by a wind that is not there, and that restless flame in the still room is taken as the sign of vayu, the air-god present in his shrine. The white lingam is so sacred the priests do not touch it with their hands. The temple’s name records three creatures who, the tradition holds, won liberation here by devotion: Sri, the spider, who wove a canopy over the lingam, Kala, the serpent, who adorned it with jewels, and Hasti, the elephant, who bathed it. Spider, serpent, and elephant, joined into one name.

Its greatest devotee in the tradition is Kannappa, the hunter-saint, untaught in any ritual, who worshipped with water carried in his own mouth and offerings of meat, and who, when the lingam’s eye seemed to bleed, tore out his own eye to replace it, and began to gouge the second before Shiva stayed his hand and gave him grace. It is the supreme Tamil parable of love outranking correctness. The temple is also the foremost place to perform the rites for Rahu and Ketu, the shadow-planets, and Sambandar’s hymn sings the theme: for Shiva’s servant, the sun and moon and “serpents twain”, the dragons of eclipse, are all made benign.

Space, at Chidambaram

Return now to the curtain at Chidambaram, the temple of akasha, ether, space, where this account began.

Here the logic of the five reaches its end. Earth could be a sand lingam, water a wet one, fire a hill, air a moving flame. But space cannot be shown by any object at all, and so the tradition shows it by showing nothing. Behind the curtain in the Chit Sabha, the Hall of Consciousness, roofed in gold, is the akasha lingam, which is empty air. The name of the town is read as chit-ambaram, the sky or atmosphere of consciousness. The deity is space, and space is consciousness, and consciousness has no shape to carve.

And yet Chidambaram is also the home of the most famous image in all of Shaivism, for here Shiva is Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance, performing the Ananda Tandava, the dance of bliss, in the golden hall. The bronze Nataraja holds the drum of creation in one hand and the fire of dissolution in another, lifts one foot in the gesture of release, and crushes underfoot the dwarf of ignorance, all within a ring of flame that is the cosmos. The dance enacts the five eternal acts of God: creation, preservation, dissolution, concealment, and grace. The temple gives you both at once, the most vivid possible form of God dancing in the hall, and behind the curtain a step away, the formless space from which the dance arises. The doctrine of form and the formless, saguna and nirguna, stands here in a single building.

The hereditary Dikshitar priests alone serve this temple, and the Cholas held its dancing Shiva as the deity of their dynasty. On its gateway towers are carved, in sequence, the hundred and eight units of classical dance set down in the Natya Shastra.

The map drawn later

There is one piece of honesty the five temples deserve, and it does not weaken them.

Each of these temples is genuinely old, and each was sung, centuries ago, by the Tamil Shaiva poet-saints, the Nayanars, in the great age of southern devotion between the seventh and ninth centuries. Each has its own ancient and independent legend, its own sthala-purana. The elemental features themselves are old and real: the spring that will not dry at Thiruvanaikaval, the fire-hill at Tiruvannamalai, the empty curtain at Chidambaram were not dreamt up by tourist boards.

But the neat system, the idea that exactly these five temples form a single set, one for each element, to be toured in order, is a later devotional and organising framework, laid over five shrines that began their lives apart. The map was drawn after the territory. This is simply how a living tradition reads its own landscape, finding a pattern in scattered holy places and making of them a single pilgrimage of meaning. The pattern is later. The places are ancient. Both things are true, and the pattern is none the worse for being made by human hands that loved the places.

Walk the five in order and the lesson builds under your feet. Earth you can hold. Water slips through the fingers. Fire you cannot touch. Air you cannot see. Space you cannot even point to.

The god gets harder to grasp at every temple, and more total.

By the time you reach the curtain at Chidambaram, there is nothing left to see, and that is the whole of what they were trying to show you.